


revenant

by papercoffin



Category: Naruto
Genre: (Because Konoha sucks), A... little bit, Alternate Universe, Canon Compliant, Dissociation, Experimental Style, Gen, Ghosts, Hallucinations, Kakashi Gaiden, Mental Health Issues, Probably? It's up to interpretation, Psychological Trauma, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25223875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papercoffin/pseuds/papercoffin
Summary: the skeleton of nohara rin drags itself across the floor to kakashi's feet.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi & Nohara Rin, Hatake Kakashi & Uchiha Obito, Nohara Rin & Uchiha Obito
Comments: 1
Kudos: 24





	revenant

rin’s ghost does not appear as rin the first time.

kakashi has been holed up in his apartment for a couple of days, and minato-sensei has been busy with his new position as hokage.

the lights are off, and it is both chillingly cold and too warm at the same time. 

kakashi’s hands are sticky and hot and they feel disgusting but he’s lost the franticness that usually accompanies the feeling so he sits against the wall in the corner of the kitchen with his stained hands.

he moved his futon to the small kitchen, because it’s closer to the sink, closer to the bathroom, and it’s easier to pull himself together when ghosts cling to his dreams and he wakes up in a cold sweat.

there’s a scraping noise from somewhere, like something being dragged, and kakashi jolts, joints locking up and lungs held in a vice grip.

the light is low - it’s far too early in the morning for the sun to have risen, but its light peeks above the horizon just enough to offer solstice to those awake. in the doorway, the small hallway leading to where kakashi’s old room was, there is a skeleton.

kakashi has not often seen skeletons. with the line of work he has, as a shinobi, it is more frequent that he sees fresh corpses, a failed imitation of a living being.

the common knowledge that sits in peoples’ brains, however, states that corpses, flesh or skeletal, do not move on their own.

the bony hand’s movements are slow, jittery, as if it were barely hanging onto a life it didn’t have. as if it were struggling, in pain, but had a goal to reach. 

kakashi sits, and he watches. the burgundy that drips from his hands make a pathway for the skeleton to follow.

the skeleton, kakashi notes, is small. it is not large enough to be that of an adult. its bones are thin, and they look brittle, old, stained with the brown that could only be dried blood and flesh. if he looks closer, he can see that some flesh  _ is _ still clinging to the bones.

it drags itself across the floor, and it is a sad struggle to watch, but he can’t find the energy to move. he sits there, his knees folded up against his chest, and stares as the skeleton crawls, dragging its minimal weight across the floor as if it were dragging the weight of the world at its ankles.

it takes a rattly, lungless breath. kakashi takes one in as well.

eternities fold over eternities and finally, it has dragged itself closer, so close, it lies at kakashi’s feet. the skeleton has made a painful journey across the entirety of the kitchen floor to the other side where kakashi sits.

over the course of its journey, sinew and tendons and muscle have grown back, but it still remains thin, gaunt, and in some areas it is still just bone.

the skeleton trembles and it rolls over onto its back. it is then that kakashi shees where its ribcage has collapsed in, the center of the trauma being a hole punched in through its torso. it has left a trail of crumbling bone across the kitchen.

“rin,” kakashi whispers. his voice is raspy and quiet from disuse. “what are you doing here?”

rin takes in another rattly breath, and this time, she has lungs, flesh thinly veiling her ribcage and hiding away her life from the rest of the world. her fingers twitch as if to move, but she lies there, unable to move any farther.

kakashi is the one who moves instead; he is just as slow, just as weak, but he scoots over to her body to support it up, cradle it. her head is a skull, and it is her face, rounded cheeks and bright eyes gone glassy, and it is bone, hollowed sockets that kakashi cannot stop staring into.

he moves so that he’s supporting her upper body with his arms and laying her in his lap. she was always a bit taller than him, but with the way she is now, she is so, so small.

one hand supports the back of her head and in the other, rin’s bony hand lies in its open palm.

they sit, and they breathe. kakashi finds it ironic that his breathing is just as stunted as that of a corpse’s.

\--

over the course of another eternity, rin becomes rin again—she is no longer a skeleton, in the medical term.

she is closer to what she was before she was murdered, but still far from looking alive. her cheeks are hollowed, skin sallow. she is shrunken in the way a body would be after the bloating phase of decomposition.

her breathing has steadied into something more stable than a death rattle, though ghosts of the terrible sound linger in her throat. 

kakashi sits there on the floor of the kitchen, and he cradles the body. she stares back, and there is a desperation there, and a desire to live, an  _ i don’t want to die _ that can often plague even the most suicidal in their final moments.

he cannot find the strength to rip words from his throat. rin must be thankful, because she cannot either.

by the time a week has passed, rin looks like she is alive. it is as if nothing happened.

kakashi walks to his room, pulling out a couple of clothes from his drawers and placing the folded cloth into rin’s arms. 

“it’ll probably be a little small,” he murmurs, the first words he’s spoken to her since her initial reappearance. 

an unspoken  _ you’ve always been taller than me _ floats between them, and rin laughs—it is a rattly, shallow noise, like there is not enough air in her lungs, but she doesn’t appear to be in pain.

kakashi turns around so the ghost of rin can adorn herself with his clothes, and when he turns back, rin is dressed in her own, kakashi’s clothing nowhere to be seen. she offers him a smile.

“...creepy. are those clothes i gave you gone, then? that was my favorite shirt, y’know.”

she laughs through her nose, hand over her mouth. kakashi offers her a weak smile back, thinly veiled by the fabric of his mask.

\--

minato-sensei finds him sitting at his tea table, eating; kakashi is unsure when he made his way into the apartment, but it isn’t unexpected.

the man looks relieved to see him alive, and he sits down at the table as well. kakashi offers him a bowl of rice—sensei says nothing about the third one, or about rin, eating happily.

“...kakashi,” minato sighs. his eyes are as kind as they always are, eyebrows furrowed in concern. “you’ve been in here for three days.”

“mm.” kakashi hums through a mouthful of rice, his mask pulled down and bunched around his neck.

they talk some more, and sensei’s voice floats through his head. he and rin share a Look.

“don’t worry, sensei,” he says quietly. it is deafeningly loud in the silence of his apartment, where only kakashi and his sensei’s breathing can be heard. “i’ll be back on missions starting tomorrow. sorry to worry you.”

they share no exchange about the girl sitting cross legged at the table with them, and rin pops another clump of rice between her chopsticks into her mouth, humming contently.

\--

rin does not leave the apartment—kakashi is plagued with anxiety that she will be gone whenever he opens the door.

“don’t be silly, kakashi!” she smacks the boy on the back. “i’ll always be here.”

he exhales and allows something like calm to wash over him, but it is a shaky calm, something fragile. whenever it grows to be stable, he looks at rin and he sees sallow skin and hollow eyes before he blinks and she is full of life again.

“i know,” he murmurs. they both know he lies.

on the first day back out, he storms back into his apartment at the end of the day with shaky hands and throws his gear off, grabbing at the sink knob so hard it nearly cracks off.

the skin on his palms are rubbed raw, clean of something invisible. kakashi’s eyes are wide and tinged with mania and fear and desperation. 

rin watches and sighs, but not from exasperation. she looks away, because she knows.

when kakashi is finally done, he goes through his usual rounds, which mainly consist of confirming rin is still there. she wriggles her fingers at him and offers a wry smile. kakashi waves back before collapsing on the floor, tension bleeding out from his body.

“what happened?”

kakashi raises a palm, though it is barely off the ground, and they both can hear the chirping of birds even with the absence of a light show and the miasma of ozone plaguing the air.

“i can’t stop seeing it,” kakashi croaks. it is something between exhaustion, frustration, and a sob. “or hearing it. or feeling it.”

“...what’s it like?”

“there’s a crunch. but it’s a bunch of little crunches. i can feel it around my hand and my arm.” the boy raises his right arm a little higher and wraps a hand around his forearm as if to emphasize where the feeling lingers. “smells like burnt flesh. sounds like birds. but also the crunch.”

he doesn’t speak of the wide-eyed stare he sees, the dying pulse and stickiness that coats his arm and hugs it like a dying child. the tremble of a body and a wet cough, because blood is filling her throat. they both know.

rin nods, quiet. after a moment of silence, she murmurs: “sorry.”

kakashi gently and weakly thwaps the back of her head, snorting the way she would to him when he was being stupid. “why’re you sorry?”

the rest of the afternoon, they are quiet, but it is a comfortable silence.

\--

“ANBU? really?”

“mm.”

“sensei’s starting to lose it, huh?”

they both giggle and snort at the table where they’ve been sharing meals since rin came back. rin nearly chokes on her rice, and some of it is on the table.

“gross.”

rin rolls her eyes and flicks it off the table, still donning a grin. “d’you know why?”

kakashi shrugs and averts his eyes as he rubs the back of his head. “...i haven’t been doing that well on my missions lately. it doesn’t really make sense.”

“really?  _ you?  _ not doing well?” rin’s teasing is light, though. she sets her chopsticks down beside the bowl with a little clack. “...honestly, though, what does he think making you a part of ANBU will help?”

he shrugs again uselessly, shame and guilt gnawing at his innards. “i’ll need to do better if he expects that much from me, though,” kakashi murmurs.

rin sighs; it’s something common, now, a soft puff of her breath floating around the room. “you’re both idiots.”

“ah, well, we’ve always been a team of idiots, yeah?”

she snorts before picking her chopsticks back up again, popping a piece of fried fish into her mouth. “yup.”

kakashi starts coming home late, or after days on end—he has a tendency of collapsing in the doorway if he can’t make it to the futon, and oftentimes, he’s coated in layers upon layers of blood.

“you’re gonna have to clean that up,” rin mumbles, toting kakashi’s limp body under her arm like a small cat. “c’mon, the blood’s gross.”

kakashi, even in his stupor, does not miss the way her eyes steel at the sight of the blood. 

even as soldiers, they both are still, in some ways, children. konoha law states the moment one is a shinobi, they are essentially an adult—to call a shinobi a child, no matter the age, is an insult. 

but the taste of the word  _ shinobi _ is bitter on his tongue; he will not try and say obito died as a shinobi. obito was still a child as well.

“you think too loud, kakashi.” 

her voice is not unkind, but it begins to settle into something kakashi recognizes as the way rin has remained sane throughout the war. she takes everything in methodically, disconnected, logically, because if she were to be a human, a child, she would shatter.

“well, it’s not like i can help it.”

kakashi is cleaned and redressed and they are sitting back at the table—no food sits between them today. they simply lounge, content with each others’ presences.

“what are you thinking about?”

“well, if you can hear it, shouldn’t you know?”

rin flicks a grain of rice at him—where’d that even come from?

he rests his chin in his hand, elbows propped on the table. his gaze is distant.

“...why do you think obito hasn’t come back, too?”

rin sobers up at this—her gaze is unreadable. it’s a wonder to kakashi, really. she doesn’t need a physical mask to shield herself away from the rest of the world.

“i don’t know,” she whispers. it is something quiet, and sad. something knowing lingers in the back of her eyes, but it is tinged with uncertainty and doubt.

kakashi sees something he sees in the mirror and he finds that little grain of rice and flicks it back—it nails her in between the eyes, and she sputters.

“you were thinking too loud,” kakashi explains, and rin kicks his shin before they both burst into laughter, like the ringing if bells.

more gently, though: “you don’t… i wouldn’t want to choose between the two of you. who gets to come back. i’m happy that you’re here at all.”

rin’s eyes slide down to the table—she wrings at her hands, and kakashi offers her a kunai to fiddle with, because idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and at some point she would begin to pick at her skin.

“i feel,” she starts. “like obito should have come back instead.”

kakashi fights the urge to fight her on it, because they’ve had the same conversation before, but flipped. “i should have died instead of obito” is what tears its way out of kakashi’s throat in those moments. rin is angry, but she understands.

so kakashi sits, and they fall into their pattern of comforting each other with their presences, a silent  _ i’m still here _ to hold close to their hearts.

\--

sensei dies, and he dies brutally—from what kakashi was able to see, his body was mangled, a hole punched through his torso by a single, domineering claw.

he looks at peace, though, kakashi thinks. the lines of worry and the shadows in and under his eyes are gone.

the body is laid down in the casket, peaceful. kushina’s casket is beside minato’s, their hands out of the caskets and intertwined while the other is folded over their stomachs.

kakashi stands vigil for a stretch of time that he recognizes as infinite. it is the next day, when the sun has risen to illuminate the wreckage of konoha once again, that he feels a hand on his shoulder.

there are no people around, now—just him, his sensei and kushina’s graves, and rin.

“let’s go home,” she whispers quietly. 

they head back to the apartment. kakashi remains awake, staring at the doorway as he sits on the kitchen floor for another skeleton to come crawling, maybe even two.

they do not come.

\--

“can i see it?”

“hm?”

“obito’s eye.”

kakashi blinks in surprise, but the eyelid slides open. rin peers at it, occasionally bringing a finger or two to his face to stretch the skin and examine it.

“mm,” she hums. “i didn’t transplant it very well, did i.”

he bats her hand away and huffs. “it’s better than anyone else could’ve done. especially since we were on the field.”

“but i could’ve done  _ better _ ,” rin whines, ever so kind and warm to others and the harshest on herself.

they’ve both grown, ever so slightly, with kakashi being sixteen and rin at seventeen. he was a little surprised that rin seemed to grow at all—rin was cheerful that she could still lord their height difference over him. it’s in a surreal manner though, and her appearance occasionally borders on uncanny valley territory.

her eyes, though, kakashi notes. they remain the same. they are full of life but it is tainted with the feeling of  _ something is wrong, something isn’t right _ . it is an uncertainty that is parasitic. it is like a happy ending that wasn’t meant to be.

kakashi reads books that rin hates and his sensei used to hate, where the hero dies honorably in battle, as a shinobi, and he finds it is similar to that. it’s supposed to be something to cherish and be happy about, but it isn’t.

he does not ignore it, but he doesn’t bring it up out loud, perhaps out of fear of shattering the reality around him.

“sensei kept telling us to be kinder to ourselves, and you parroted him,” kakashi points out. “don’t be a hypocrite.”

rin groans and flops onto the floor, and again, as part of their routine, they are quiet and at peace with that quiet.

\--

_ there is another revenant after all _ , kakashi thinks idly, when the mask shatters into pieces, and the marred face of obito stares back at him.

**Author's Note:**

> this is all over the place and mostly just comes straight from the brain... pure unfiltered bs i hope it's enjoyable even with the abrupt end ' D`


End file.
